


Interstellar Spaces

by yet_intrepid



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Remus reads Eliot, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-28
Updated: 2013-12-28
Packaged: 2018-01-06 10:21:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1105661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all go into the dark. Regulus into the darkness of death. Sirius into the darkness of grief, with Remus by his side. And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.</p>
<p>The vacant into the vacant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interstellar Spaces

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Silent Funeral](https://archiveofourown.org/works/30647) by [Jo Robbins (plenilune)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plenilune/pseuds/Jo%20Robbins). 



They are sitting on James and Lily’s couch when Remus asks if Sirius would like to have a funeral.

Sirius just shows him the paper again, the paper that started it all with its announcement of the elaborate ceremony that his parents were having for Regulus, the announcement of the “tragic accident” that everyone knew was anything but. Nothing bad was an accident in times like these.

“Well,” says Remus, “I know they’re having the burial. But if you’d like, we can still—a ceremony, you know. A memorial. Since what your parents do for your brother won’t mean anything.”

“My brother was a Death Eater,” Sirius says. His voice is flat.

“Well,” says Remus again, pointedly, “the Aurors didn’t kill him though, did they? We’d have heard.”

“So he got himself killed by his Death Eater pals. Bully for him then; wonder who it was. Bellatrix maybe. Or Snape.”

Remus is quiet. Being killed by Death Eaters is not an enviable fate, he thinks. It is not an uncommon thought, considering the fate might become his any day. He wonders if Regulus went down fighting, or whether he had been captured, stripped of his wand.

“Bella casts a particularly nasty Cruciatus,” Sirius blurts. “And we all know about Snivellus’…creativity. God, Remus—”

Remus considers putting his hand on Sirius’ shoulder, but Sirius is hunched over and angled away and does not look like he wants to be touched. But he does not know what to say. He has never had a brother. Certainly never one who fought for a dark wizard and ended up dead at the hands of his own side.

So he goes back to the first question. “Would you like to do something then, to—commemorate?”

Sirius breathes out heavily. “Hell, Remus, I don’t know. I’d like to have a drink, that’s what.”

“It’s ten in the morning and you drank yourself sick last night. Lily gave you a double dose of her extra-strength hangover potion. Spelled it into you while you slept.”

Sirius groans. “Come on, Moony. Not even a little?”

“Wait until noon at least, Pads.”

Sirius rolls his eyes petulantly and for a minute he looks young enough to be back in sixth year, but then he meets Remus’ eyes and looks old again, weary and bitter and old.

“I wouldn’t know what to say,” he sighs. “What is there to say? Reg was an idiot. He died because he was an idiot.”

“But an idiot who might have seen the light,” Remus puts in. His voice is gentle and he feels as old as Sirius looks. “And that means something.”

Sirius inclines his head in acknowledgement. “I still haven’t got anything to say,” he says. “It’d be a pretty silent funeral. Empty and cold like the spaces between stars, like the middle of Apparating, like—I don’t know, like your flat when there was only a mattress and that crate of books and no lamps.”

“Dark,” says Remus. “Dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark. The vacant into the vacant. Maybe you did read Eliot after all.”

“Fuck’s sake, Moony,” says Sirius, “could you leave off the poetry for once?”

Remus raises his eyebrows. “And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,” he quotes. “Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.”

 And suddenly Sirius is curling up against his shoulder and Remus is digging a volume of Eliot out of his bag (who knows why, but it’s there) and he opens it to East Coker and (intending to get through the section) reads:

_Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,  
The vacant interstellar spaces—_

And then Sirius is sobbing, and Remus thinks that the brothers are as far apart as stars now, and have been for years, but maybe despite the vast vacancy of death between them they are a little closer now than they were.


End file.
